Skyrim Nexus - mods and community

Well we've entered 2016 with a productivity bang, all hands are on deck and there is plenty going on behind the scenes here at the Nexus so I thought I'd give you all an insight into what's happening...Firstly a quick recap - we began the redesign process in the second half of 2015 by first trying to work out what our users like and dislike about the site. We were overwhelmed with the response to our survey which provided us with a wealth of information, our community is definitely one of the best in the world and it was great to see how truly passionate you all are in regards to our site. A lot of people commented as to how they cannot browse the site on anything other than their PC, others were more interested in trying to find mods quickly and easily, others just wanted the site to be made 'fresher' and 'inline with modern web standards'. We took the time and read through each and every response that we received, that in itself took several weeks.We decided to aim towards specific goals that were brought up over and over again, the first is for us to create a cracking mobile / tablet / responsive experience so that the site can be enjoyed by any user on any device, but without this experience lessening the experience from our core crowd of users who still visit the Nexus via their desktops. Secondly, we want the site to be easy to navigate around with search deeply integrated with the main functions, and thirdly, we want it to look nice and be a pleasure to use. The list goes on and on, but you get the general gist.We knew that we weren't going to be able to do this all ourselves and that we were going to need some help from a professional, so we advertised for a UX/UI designer and got a great response from a number of people. Each person brought something to the table but after a lot of deliberation we contracted Phill into the position. He immediately took it upon himself to read through the research we had already conducted (survey results, hot-spots, device statistics) and started producing diagrams and wireframes for us to check out based on his conclusions from the research.Things were moving along swiftly, but we wanted input from the community and setup a focus group of 15 Nexus users to help. This group has been nothing but brilliant, right from the word go we have had a constant and thorough source of input from them. What has been great is that they come from such a diverse demographic that they represent a great cross section of the Nexus community, giving us an all around feel for what we are doing and whether it would or wouldn't work. I tip my hat to them for the time and effort they have expended on assisting us, it's not over yet though guys ;)The focus group talks on behalf of the Nexus users. While we would love to include everyone in every stage of the design process, I hope you can appreciate that having 10 million people all chiming in on any sort of process is just completely untenable. I understand that some people are concerned that they’re not being more involved in the process, however, we believe we’ve done well by you these past 14 years and ask that you trust that we’ve got everyone’s best intentions in mind once again!With the focus group onboard we went full steam ahead on the wireframes. These proved invaluable to begin placement of features on the site and begin to visualise the site routes that people would take to do things.An example of one of the wireframes we used is below, please note that these are old wireframes and may not reflect the final layout / look of the site.After the wireframe stage we worked on design mocks, which included things like fonts, icons, more placement tests and colour schemes. Again, please note that these are old designs and may not reflect the final layout / look of the site.We’re now into February. Currently, Phill is converting the mock-ups into HTML, CSS and Javascript that our site developers can then integrate into our framework. This is a time consuming and painstaking task, as we test each page created against numerous browsers, devices and resolutions to ensure the maximum compatibility possible. But we’re also beginning to see the fruits of our labour in an interactive way for the first time.Our aim now is to get the site to a stage where we can open it up to run alongside the current site, at first simply as a shell to allow you to experience it and see if it breaks when you try and do things. But should this be successful it will then be attached to the live database and you will be able to use it alongside the existing site. Between us we’ll iron out any bugs that are discovered and hopefully come out the end with a product that is better, and that we are all proud of.For those interested, I’ve created a small timeline of events since the beginning of the redesign process.Any questions, please feel free to get in contact.Kind regards